Can 'quality marking' be used to provide effective feedback within higher education?

Providing written feedback to learners within Higher Education can be a time-consuming and frequently ineffective process, with comments often undervalued or not acted upon. The same concerns exist within the primary sector; marking systems do not always effectively support the principles of Assessment for Learning. This frustration resulted in the development of the 'Quality Marking' model for primary schools (Clarke 1998) which follows an explicit process within which the type of comments, or prompts, used are key. This small scale study has investigated whether 'quality marking' – and in particular the use of scaffold prompts – can be applied to the Higher Education context. A group of final year student teachers within initial teacher training received and acted upon the feedback, as well as completing a series of questionnaires to record their perceptions of the process and its formative value. It is clear from the data gathered that 'quality marking' was viewed as an effective approach. Key identified reasons for this were the likelihood of the feedback to feed forward into future learning, the level of engagement from the learner, the clarity of how to bridge the learning gap, and the beginnings of self-monitoring.

Providing written feedback to learners within Higher Education can be a time-consuming and frequently ineffective process, with comments often undervalued or not acted upon. The same concerns exist within the primary sector; marking systems do not always effectively support the principles of Assessment for Learning. This frustration resulted in the development of the 'Quality Marking' model for primary schools (Clarke 1998) which follows an explicit process within which the type of comments, or prompts, used are key. This small scale study has investigated whether 'quality marking' – and in particular the use of scaffold prompts – can be applied to the Higher Education context. A group of final year student teachers within initial teacher training received and acted upon the feedback, as well as completing a series of questionnaires to record their perceptions of the process and its formative value. It is clear from the data gathered that 'quality marking' was viewed as an effective approach. Key identified reasons for this were the likelihood of the feedback to feed forward into future learning, the level of engagement from the learner, the clarity of how to bridge the learning gap, and the beginnings of self-monitoring.